Recently I popped down to Portobello Road, Notting Hill, to check out a new burger joint that has been on everyone’s lips since it opened, Boom Burger. It’s ‘USP’, so to speak, is its dishing up of Jamaican themed burgers. With very little idea of what the hell that could entail, I headed down to try it out. It’s nestled in a tiny unit on Portobello Market row and from the outside looks like nothing. Inside has a couple of booths and a large open fry kitchen which you order straight from. The menu is small and burger-centric: 3 different burgers (Jerk chicken, veggie or beef) and plantain chips or fries. Their signature beef burger, the ‘Boom Burger’ comes in at £8 with cheese and thing called ‘bacon jam’ which sounded so marvelous that it immediately decided my order. It’s a good burger. The patty tastes pretty good and is cooked pink as it should be. It held a lot of juice which dribbled everywhere and ran down your arms, which is fine with me but perhaps not somewhere to take a first date. Fat to protein ratio wise; it’s middle of the range. It’s certainly not a dense meat-heavy patty, but it’s also not as fat rich as some of London’s other burgers, like the Bleecker St. for example. The bacon jam was an interesting one and it didn’t do it for me as much as I’d expected. It came as a dark mush on top of the burger that tasted alright in a smoky and moist sort of way, but could be improved by adding both sweetness and some crisp bits of bacon for texture. The trimmings were classic: lettuce, tomato and onion and came with this moreish spicy mayonnaise.

Another item worthy of mention were the Boom Burger wings because well...they were great and perhaps even my favourite dish here. The outer coating is crunchy, has some spicing in it for a bit of a pow and the chicken was cooked perfectly. With more of that spicy mayonnaise, these went down an absolute treat alongside a Red Stripe (of course). The vibe is super cool. Jamaican music blares loudly, the staff are extremely friendly and the atmosphere is almost so relaxed as to be horizontal. On arriving we explained that one friend was running late and asked if they wanted us to come back later rather than hold up a table – ‘just chill’ our hostess commanded and this seems to be the motto of the place. In summary, I liked it a lot and would definitely come back. The burger itself doesn’t make my top 5 in London list but for somewhere to come and kick back with your pals, free of the god awful queues you get at other no-reservations burger joints, it takes some beating.